Mike Ybarra: "We wouldn't have been able to usher in true 4K with a lower price" by putting Xbox One X at $399

The simple and straightforward goal of Microsoft with Xbox One X is to deliver true 4K gaming to every consumer who wants the best hardware for the lowest price possible. In an interview with Polygon, Mike Ybarra explained Microsoft could have made Xbox One X at $399 but it would compromise the console as a premium product.
Here’s what he said:
“When we looked at the overall design, we could do less memory. We could do under-clocked components so we don’t have to have the cooling system that we have in here. There’s any number of things you could think of.
This is designed for the premium gamer that wants the absolute best experience. And so compromising any of those then makes that message much harder to communicate to them. We showed them the smallest Xbox we’ve ever created, the most power, the best price per performance you can get anywhere, in this box. That’s what we’re delivering.
I think if you start taking away some of those items, people will say, ‘Well, what were your goals?’ And that’s an area that we don’t want that confusion to exist.
[at $399] we wouldn’t have been able to usher in 4K to the living room, and that was a design pillar for this box. There’s lots of goals in the program, from compatibility to everything. But one, let’s really usher in true 4K where developers don’t have to think about, ‘Wow, how do we stretch this and make it really work?’ We needed to deliver that to consumers. They asked us for uncompromised true 4K in the living room. And so we leveraged a lot of PC technology, from the cooling, the power management system that’s in this, to get it this small — while managing acoustics. That was the goal.”